Goncharenko centre 2025-8-3: A few short topics

Post event notes: See farther down on this page.

Translation: auto translation of this page into Ukrainian

Who read "Frankl's book "Man's search for meaning"?

This time there was only 1 attendee who read the book, or rather listened to an audio book version, so I skipped discussing any details and only mentioned a few things. This book can be discussed next time, if there are multiple people who read at least a significant part of it.

A few short topics

1. Scam or not? (train your imagination and deductive ability): My mother told me about reading about a situation years ago. It stood out to me and I remember everything that stands out, which then pops into my mind when it is useful. It was about an advertisement in newspaper for a car:

The advertisement said something like: Rolls Royce (very expensive luxury car) for sale, £1,-. This seems (and is, and was at the time) ridiculously low. A student responded to the advertisement. He asked whether anyone else had responded and why she was selling it so cheaply.
Question: What do you think the answers were? What was the goal of the advertisement?

Answer: The goal was to sell the Rolls Royce as cheaply as possible, because her husband had died and he stated in his will that the proceeds of the sale of the Rolls Royce should go to his mistress... [ Why not state to give the car itself? I don't know. ] She stated that nobody else had responded... (obviously all others who had read the ad thought it was fake or going to be a scam). It was real! This shows that: "sometimes if it seems too good to be true, it can actually be true...".

2. Scam or not: From a youtube channel 'According to Nicole', I watched a video about scams. Well a part of that video. One of them was 'self service checkouts'. ATB has recently installed them in various stores in Kremenchuk, they were already present in Fozzy. The issue that she mentioned is that it lowers cost but not prices for customers. What do you think?

3. Critical thinking (use your general knowledge and train your deductive ability): I watched a bit of a video on youtube, police go to a horrible woman in an apartment. One commenter wrote "there is a 6 missing in the apartment number".
Question: Do you know now what the number of her apartment is?

Answer: The apartment number is 66 because of a 6 missing. From 6 I immediately thought of 666 which is 'the sign of the devil' which fits with the woman in that apartment being horrible... I knew it instantly and it turned out to be correct...

Post meeting notes

To the question of the Rolls Royce, various interesting answers of what it could be such as:
- It was a joke
- It was the wrong price, missing a number. This is an option but I would say not in this case. 1M as an abbreviation for 1 million could not be correct, it was far less expensive. a zero missing or different digit somewhere is still not enough. I suspect the real value would be more like 50000 (perhaps more), but even at a price 10000 there are too many digits missing and missing several digits is very unlikely.
- Someone mentioned: Perhaps it was a wife selling something of her husband to punish him. Yes, this happens and it is similar to that [ though now he is not alive, but she is going against what he wanted and what he wrote in his will, so in a sense she is then punishing him in this case too. ]

Then about self scan: Nobody thought it was a scam, and of course it is not. Every business seeks ways to reduce costs. [ This woman is a really stupid woman with strangely a lot of subscribers, then again, that is often the case on youtube ] I will give another example of what I've seen called a scam related to self-checkout, next meeting...

We talked about various topics related to the book by Frankl, and I mentioned a book by Stefan Zweig, which I already mentioned in relation to the book "Flowers for Algernon" some time ago as it is about transformation and seeing things from 2 different viewpoints, similar to seeing situations in the camp in it and from an outside perspective, and this time I mentioned this book because it is also about WW2, and about a person in a prison, kept in solitary confinement who finds a book about chess positions in the interrogator's office. The problem he has is being in solitary confinement. How to not go crazy? Well, he then puts himself in the position of player and opponent and tries to play all games in his head. With this he keeps himself busy until he is finally released but it does have a consequences, and that is what the 2nd part of the book is about. This is a very interesting book, perhaps one to discuss in a later meeting.

So one of the topics we talked about is your thinking. Being in a camp, and in a prison, is where people are forced to think a lot about life, about their goals in life, about themselves in general.

I then asked about whether the attendees like background music. One guy didn't like it, he wanted to listen to music or do something, not both, it doesn't work. I agreed. I cannot give proper attention to music when having it on as background music and I can't properly work on whatever it is I am doing when listening to music. It is just bad. But the others (most of them, not sure whether I asked all), did like it or did do it. [ For me what can work as background noise, is for example on the TV (when I still had a TV) I put on a game of the sport of English cricket. It is relaxing, not attention grabbing (no busy/shouty commentary, now and then hitting a ball, quiet commentary), and when I wanted to relax a bit from what I was doing then I looked at what is going on. I talked about this with the researcher with whom I did my MSc degree in mathematical physics. He said that someone he knew switched on his vacuum cleaner when he really wanted to concentrate... I suppose it works by that the noise drowns out any other sounds, and it is like white noise (noise in all frequencies, no specific tones), which means it doesn't grab your attention. ]

In a situation like in a camp you are forced to think (about themselves, their thoughts, feelings, their choices in life, anything that is within you) and a lot of people do not like to do this. They try to evade this. In normal life you also have these situations, namely when you are alone. A lot of people then avoid thinking by putting on music, or a radio or a TV as background noise.

I said that if I were ever to have to go to prison, I would like to be in solitary confinement, no whining, no talking, from other people. I find it strange that such confinement is problematic for many people, but again this is almost certainly related to not wanting to look inside and analyse yourself and what you are doing with your life. [ if you then think about what to do, if you don't have for example pen and paper to write anything down, as in "Chess story", well: This is sort of an issue but also not an issue. Up to 2022 I did a lot of analysis for my project to understand everything (life, people), while cycling to other cities from where I lived, in particular to do groceries. There is 1 supermarket in the city where I lived but I wanted more choice (someone mentioned the previous meeting that I seem to like Fozzy, well, I actually visit all supermarkets and various other shops for food because all of them have a different assortment. I did the same in the Netherlands) and so I cycled to where my sister lives or another city, both about 10 km away, to do groceries. On this trips I was thinking about various things I read and analysed in my mind what makes sense, as if I was giving a lecture. From one topic to the next I went, and I dealt with several topics while riding. Sometimes I was concentrating too much and at junctions then took the most frequent direction but wrong this time so I was riding a bit the wrong way :) However, when I got home I often did not remember which topics I was thinking about. I was annoyed: "I had some really good ideas but now I forgot!". But it turned out that I always remembered everything later when the type of topic came up again from other topics or from reading something that reminded me. I then redid the analysis for various details and since I had already done that analysis before, it was much faster that 2nd time. This means that, yes, you can think of things, and say months later you are released (it should work the same years later, with some really old analysis I did but didn't write down, I was reminded of that at some point and used that in my project and I realised that the ideas and methods I used, it felt as if I did the analysis 'yesterday', instead of 15 or more years earlier), you can then start to reconstruct what you thought about, but much more quickly... ]

[ By the way, solitary confinement is very similar to how I lived for many months in 2020 with the chinese flu nonsense, I was mostly at home, alone, working on ideas and doing house renovations... ]

Further we talked about why I am in Ukraine (as most of the attendees this time were new to the meetings), and what about risks. I explained a few things in previous meetings, but I stated that I had plans before the war and as I said to someone in a shop in June, on a trip from Stryi towards Ivano Frankivsk, that "There is a war, really?" (puzzled look at first, then a smile), and "I was not going to let that idiot from Russia spoil my plans". The risks are fine, you can die at any point just crossing the street. I did some risk calculations in 2022 when I was in Zaporizhya and was quite close to the impact of the rocket attacks (about 2 km). In fact I like to see the Ukrainian defences shoot at drones that go over or near my house :)

And why Kremenchuk? Well, a part of the reason is nostalgia, but I like a lot here such as the parks, the beach at the river (though I am not someone who goes to lie on a beach), and what was interesting here was for example the large Lenin statue. Not because it was of Lenin, but because it was so big, iconic. Last year I was in Zhovti vodi, and there there is a huge statue of riders on horses. That is very cool, Kremenchuk could use such a statue on the now very empty square. Then there is the bridge to the other side, motorists are only allowed to go 40 km/h on that bridge and it is described in some places to be the most dangerous bridge in the world. It doesn't feel very safe walking across it, especially the section with metal plates that buckle when you walk over them, but I was told the main importance is the railway bridge and that is checked every year so it is actually safe... But still it adds something. The area across the bridge is nice, and there are various areas not far from Kremenchuk that are nice to ride to (Omelnik, a spot at the edge of Gradizk at the river, ). Then to nostalgic factors, for example that I stayed in a hotel along the railway, called "Yolki palki", which a great outdoor eating facility. The latter still exists but the hotel has been converted in offices. I had some very interesting experiences and meetings here, for example talks with a hotel administrator of the hotel who suggested places to go and how to get there (and then I made day trips with a marshrutka to Kharkov, Dnipro, etc.) so all that gives a feeling of nostalgia.

Another topic, which is related to Frankl's book, was why people don't understand other people, in particular an issue with many psychologists. Frankl was a psychologist...

We also talked about something very different, sweeteners in food/drink. I hate them, especially sacharine and aspartame/acesulfame which all give me a strong disgusting aftertaste. What is the point of sweeteners? People are not getting thinner from eating/drinking less sugar in such foods/drinks! The problem is simply that people often eat too much. I mentioned that this can happen inadvertently, such as happened with me years ago. I was cycling regularly (twice a week) to my sister, about 10 km, so 40 km per week, at high speed (30-40 km/h) because I like to cycle fast, and at some point my bicycle needed a repair. I stopped riding, but I ate the same as before. This resulted in that I gained about 8 kg after several months. I did not like it! I started to eat less, fixed my bicycle, cycled and in no time the added weight was gone.